We’ve finally found a solution. You see, there are only a handful (literally) of totally vegetarian restaurants in all of Finland, so making a category only for them seemed a bit of overkill. There are, however, many restaurants with a variety of good options for vegetarians, but there’s a lot of grey area between having a few leaves of iceberg lettuce in the salad bar and offering a range of vegetarian main courses that really satisfy.
No one person can really list all the places that fulfil this requirement. So we are leaving it up to everyone at once. Every restaurant page now has a voting box in the bottom right hand corner:
As long as more than 50% of the people voting are of the opinion that the restaurant is child friendly or vegetarian friendly, it remains in those categories on the main map page. As soon as the “Yes” votes drop below 50%, the restaurant is removed from the category. This takes into account the fact that restaurant menus, etc can and do change.
In the example to the left, three people believe the restaurant is child friendly, and three believe it is not vegetarian friendly.
We also added the child-friendly category because families with children, like vegetarians, often have a hard time going out to eat, and it is largely the staff ’s willingness and ability to accomodate the family’s needs (the pram, the screaming children, and so on) that makes all the difference. Again, this category is another grey area of opinion, so it is our hope that the combination of for and against votes will result in the greatest accuracy.
We may add other categories later, if demand is high enough. At the moment, we want to be very careful about which categories we add, because each one adds more clutter and makes the site more complicated. As a result we have also set up a category-voting forum, where you can add your wishes for the future.
I totally support the voting possibility – and of course it must work on the mobile version as well. Now I can’t vote even on my computer.
On the other hand seriously think that leaving out the category of vegetarian restaurants is a bad idea.
Yes, there are only a handful of them (no need to tell be about that, although the present situation in Helsinki is quite different from what it used to be…), but the strange thing about us vegetarians is that some of us really prefer eating in a real vegetarian restaurant. This applies especially to some people who may come from more vegetarian friendly countries – and who also may have difficulties in communicating the meaning of vegetarian to the restaurant staff…
Hi Antti,
Voting should be working fine on the computer at the moment as long as you’re registered and logged in. If you’re unable to vote, there’s a bug. Please let us know if this is the case!
You can currently find all totally vegetarian restaurants by typing “kasvis” or “vegetarian” into the search field or map keyword filter(top right of map). Helsinki has four totally vegetarian restaurants, and Tampere has only two, so at the moment it doesn’t seem to make sense to give them their own category.
Our logic is that the categories let you filter broad chunks, while the search field or map keyword focuses in on specific needs like “japanese” or “vegetarian” which only have a few results. By doing this we avoid growing one of those endlessly long category lists with everything in it from “gastropub” to “greek” which is a pain to scroll through and clutters up the site. Also if a category only has a tiny number of restaurants, then there’ll be many cases where you’ll end up with no results, which can also be annoying.
Until I read this and saw the difference between the all green and all red charts, I’d only seen all green charts and found it confusing — it’s green on both sides so does that mean that there’s an equal number of yes and no votes?
If it was 2 yes votes and 1 no vote, I expected to be a real chart: the left side all green and the right side half red so I can tell at a glance just how close the vote is.
Or a simpler way: just draw the left side green for winning yes votes, and just draw the right side red for winning no votes (with the other side grey).